Secret Service Report Noted Aaron Swartz’s ‘Depression Problems’

The U.S. government noted in passing that Aaron Swartz suffered “depression problems” nearly two years before his suicide last January, according to a newly released Secret Service report.

The disclosure comes in a new tranche of 26 pages of agency documents about the late coder and activist, released in my ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the agency.

The documents are mostly agency reports from the first months of the investigation, beginning in January 2011 when Swartz was arrested by Cambridge police after using MIT’s public network to bulk-download 4 million academic articles from the JSTOR archive.

MIT had a subscription to the archive that made it free to use from MIT’s campus. The Secret Service was brought into the case early on, and federal prosecutors ultimately charged Swartz with wire fraud and computer hacking.

One report memorializes an April 13, 2011 law enforcement interview of Swartz’s former partner, Quinn Norton, at the federal building in Boston. According to the report, Norton related that Swartz had phoned her from jail when he was first arrested near MIT’s campus, and that she was concerned for his mental state.

“[Norton] said that she did not want to know why he had been arrested and that she was concerned about how he was emotionally,” the report notes. She “said that the main part of the discussion was regarding Swartz’s mental health and that Swartz has had some depression problems.”

Norton’s name is redacted from the document, but she confirms that she was the interview subject. She previously wrote about her experience with the government at length in a piece in the Atlantic.

In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding. When the agency ignored my administrative appeal, I sued.

The court ordered the immediate release of some documents, but the process was slowed in July when MIT and JSTOR moved to intervene in the lawsuit. Last month, the judge in the case approved a stipulated agreement to satisfy their concerns and restart the document flow.

The Secret Service has thus far released 130 pages on Aaron Swartz. The agency says it has approximately 20,000 pages of documents in all — most of them computer files — plus 193 photographs and 17 videos.

(Disclosures: I knew Aaron Swartz and worked on a project with him. Quinn Norton has been a WIRED contributor and is a friend).